Leviticus Highlights
Introduction
This lesson is the second of two on the book of Leviticus, a book in need more of a bird’s-eye view than a dissection, which Constable’s notes can provide if needed. We’ll cover three topics: defilement laws, sabbatical and jubilee years, and tithes. Please refer to these resources as well: this commentary, the NETS Bible, and this LXX Interlinear.
Defilement laws
Generally speaking, any body secretion that could be considered “life liquid” caused defilement. On the positive side, such laws gave people time to rest and heal since they couldn’t do their normal religious and civic duties. So we shouldn’t think of this as shaming people; instead, it not only gives them rest but also honors God as absolutely holy and perfect.
Regarding uncleanness after childbirth, there is no dancing around the fact that the time of being unclean was twice as long for giving birth to a girl as it was for a boy. Not surprisingly, many take this as a statement of inferiority of being or essence on the part of females, because another lowest-of-sinners has been brought into the world. But our study of Genesis 3 put any such notion to rest; besides, the baby itself is not called unclean.
A less misogynistic view holds that the mother would want more bonding time with a baby girl, yet this makes little sense unless she expects the baby to be quickly sold as a slave, since women were segregated in society and spent their lives mainly with other women. Any mother of boys can tell you that bonding time doesn’t care whether the baby wears pink or blue.
Can we really think that the God who promised Eve that her seed would defeat the serpent’s seed would turn around and demean all her seed forever? And did women in ancient near east culture even need God to make sure they knew their place? The simple fact is that God hasn’t told us why he’s done a lot of the things he’s done, and we have to trust him to have valid reasons— not to make up our own, or to use his silence to excuse putting one half the human race over the other.
But what about the vow price of a female being significantly less than that for a male? This was essentially putting a value on a person’s life, so is God saying that men outvalue women? Not at all; God is saying that society valued men’s lives more because of their earning potential and the monetary value lost if the person died.
1 Tim. 1:9 states that the law is not for the righteous but for the sinful. So in these laws of Moses, the purpose is to deal with sinners, to keep them from going too far astray. What we should conclude from this is not that God made women as inferiors to men, but that sin needs to be kept on a leash. As has been said before, it’s a step, not the whole staircase.
Now by this time, those who are convinced that God is indeed a respecter of persons will have concluded that anyone who argues for equality of the sexes is something we might call the Christian F-word: a feminist. They seem to fear that equality of being is a slippery slope to all kinds of heathen beliefs and practices. But the fact is that this is a study of the Bible, not of people, and it isn’t God who ever intended to put one person over another.
As further evidence of this, take note of the fact that Biblical equality does not advocate the murder of babies (abortion), nor the practice of sexual deviancy in any way. In these passages we clearly see what God thinks of homosexuality and beastiality: They are detestable, perverted, and disgusting, so the penalty under the laws of Moses was death. Unlike the blending of fabrics or eating certain animals, this type of sin, like murder or theft, is clearly a line that not even Gentiles are to cross.
Before we move on to the next topic, we might be wondering why secreted blood is unclean, but sacrificed blood is cleansing. As Constable’s notes point out, the difference is that the sacrificed blood represents the giving of one healthy life for another, instead of being due to some disease or temporary physical condition.
Sabbatical and jubilee years
There were two kinds of sabbath rest years for the land itself: one every seventh year, and a special one every 7x7 or 49th year, also called the Jubilee year. In both cases they could harvest whatever grew, but they could not plow or prune. For the Jubilee, there were to be trumpet blasts on the tenth day of the seventh month (roughly our October).
But on the Jubilee year all land reverted to its original tribe. Because of that, the sale price of any land between Jubilees was to be pro-rated to the number of years remaining— which, again, shows that land was leased rather than truly bought and sold, on the basis of how many harvests a person would get.
Land could also be sold to what is called a “kindsman-redeemer” if a poor person really needed the cash, so the land would stay in the family. That is, a clan must not turn a blind eye to the poor among their own, but were obligated to help them as much as they could.
The same principle applied to Hebrew slaves, who were sold because of poverty, and these were to be released on the Jubilee just as the land was. Neither was interest to be charged to fellow Hebrews; no profit was to be made on the backs of any of them who were in poverty.
At this point I can hear the critics muttering about Jews and money, but do we not give things to our relatives that we would otherwise sell to outsiders? Do we give the same rights and privileges to foreigners that we give to citizens? And to be fair, per this source about Jews and money, it was the early state-church that pushed the Jews into banking and finance. Since the state-church took such a strong stance against charging interest but needed it to finance their business, they thought God wouldn’t mind if they used the Jews to do their banking for them— the same mentality that justified their use of state military power to enforce religious compliance. In both cases, they thought they’d be off the hook because they delegated their dirty work.
This is not unlike the Pharisees who legalistically wouldn’t take back Judas’ betrayal fee because it was blood money; it was all about legal loopholes rather than principles of ethics or morality. This “solution” of the state-church led eventually to the invention of international banking, first with the Medici family. They predated the Rothschilds by a couple hundred years, but likely served as a prototype for what has become a monstrous oppressing entity over the whole world. So before we point fingers, we should ask who really created this monster.
Tithes
Finally, let’s look at the issue of tithing. We can see that an annual harvest tithe was done on increase or profit from crops and herds— not any and all income or wages, and not from anyone who wasn’t a land owner gaining the profit. And it was paid to the temple so the landless Levites would have food, per Num. 18 and Chron. 31.
There was also an annual tithe for all of the people, who would give a tenth of that tithe to the Levites and poor, then take the rest and consume it themselves at the Temple. From the description in Deut. 12:4-19, 14:22-27, and 26:10-11, it was essentially a huge national holiday. Notice especially in Deut. 14:25-26 that the party included alcoholic beverages.
On top of that, there was a tithe every third year especially for the poor, which was collected in local towns to keep food banks stocked. This too is not described here but in Deut. 14 and 26. There are some nice infographics about all this here.
You will never hear a church sermon on tithing from the New Testament, because it simply isn’t there and cannot be there. Nothing ever connects a local church to the Temple of Israel, or pastors to the priesthood, or the wholesale replacement of food with money, much less putting a guilt trip on all working-class people to tithe their paychecks. Tithing as we know it wasn’t officially demanded until about the mid-500s a.d., and it flies in the face of the explicit teaching for Christians in 2 Cor. 8:8-15 and 9:6-7. It is impossible to give (not tithe) without compulsion when it’s demanded as a requirement to support an organization’s staff and property, or when people are threatened with God’s curses. Christians are to be generous, and this cannot and must not be enforced by others.
So Leviticus is not a bucket of proof-texts for control freaks to use against Christians, nor is it a weapon of oppression and cold-bloodedness as the critics allege. It simply governed the civic and religious life of the agrarian nation of Israel, so they could enjoy God’s blessings in the land and be reminded of the hard lessons of the past.
Above all, they reminded Israel of what it takes to be in good standing with a holy God, to be considerate of others including animals and property, and even to be considerate of the land itself. All of it, even their own lives, were the property of God, who was graciously allowing them to lease it. This was the relationship, the proper connection between God and people, which underlaid every aspect of Hebrew life. If they understood and accepted this relationship, they would behave accordingly, which would serve as a shadow of the coming age of grace.